Archive for the ‘Secret Shine’ Category

A dream put this song in my head. I was back in high school but the age i am now, and i hear from my maths class a band rehearsing it in the music room. Through no small amount of desperation – desperation i had enough of then, but has accumulated to unbearably unused amounts now – i run out of class to find this band and this unknown kin of mine they are. Of course they’re young and beautiful, well-dressed and affluent, but they were at my school (ten years later) and they had been affected by Secret Shine enough to replicate them and speak the exigency of their youths through it. What could i do in front of them but a thing possible only in dreams and dance requisitely as hard as this song means to me? All the while i was thinking why they didn’t ask me to join their band.

Well that was my dream. There’s a lot of ugliness here: Jealousy and spite towards youth who haven’t wasted theirs yet, regression back to high school, the want for all this, the want to be noticed, dancing just to prove a point that this music affects ugly, old me just as them. It’s boring to say, and i’m sure it happens to everyone, but i think my time has passed. I’m hulled in, invisible, ineffective, and everything i believe i might have to offer the world is hulled in with me. How can people tell you’re a decent person if your ability to communicate that you are – in any way from verbally, qualifications, appearance, other sellable qualities – is completely non-existent?

I’ve decided i’m giving this up in the new year. I have to change my routine, and i haven’t written anything good in years. If it’s to give up to try and be more effective in the real world or to better disappear from both worlds, we’ll see. At least i’ll spend less time on the internet. I’m very depressed. To chronic levels, if i’m ever to believe i can actually admit that. To write it doesn’t seem like the admission it should but i don’t think i will ever do anything more. What do you do? Friends, call me. People, like me. Jobs, hire me. Life, work out. World, stop seeming like not the place for me. Hair, come back. Me, try for once. Try in the face of every crippling thing, imagined and not, that says you can’t. Or just disappear. This is a great song.

Maybe Secret Shine only have one really great song. This is the B-side to the Loveblind single, and where that song is some floating, warm, otherworldly perfection, this seems lazy and grounded, like they used all their A-material for the A-side and had to find something quickly for the underside. This is not a bad song. Not at all. It’s just not the kind of song to make one want to ever flip the record over from the bliss on the other side.

As testament to just how deep this world’s well of wonderful music and wonderful bands goes: A few weeks ago, i decided once and for all to go through every Sarah Records 7″, 1 to 100 (missing the fanzine numbers, of course) one by one. I don’t know why i hadn’t before. Maybe because now, through certain means, i finally had access to every record they released. The music, at least.

One hundred 7″ records is a lot of music. It was a journey that covered the pretty good to the sublime. It was a journey through music i’d already had shoved under my nose and music that for some reason proprietors of taste kept from me. Music i had never heard before, music i had heard before but not at the right time in my life, and music i had already completely been won over by and i looked to as an indispensable fixture in my life. This Secret Shine record was one kept from me, a discovery, and one now very indispensable.

This is a perfect song to me. I guess to many already familiar with more perfect songs it might be a bit precious, or sound like some third-rate My Bloody Valentine clone – a comparison the two bands’ concurrence and the state of music and pedal staring at the time doesn’t discourage. I have a feeling they’re the kind of band you relent and listen to after exhausting the big names. But to me this is better than anything My Bloody Valentine ever did (except for maybe You Made Me Realise. I love that song). So i’m wrong. Whatever. I’m so happy to have found this.